Liberation Archive

(This tribute to Comrade Srilata by Kumudini Pati first appeared in Mainstream.) Srilata Swaminathan was not only a comrade, with whom I worked for almost ten long years in the women’s movement led by AIPWA; she was a dear friend,with whom I could discuss literature, art, folk music, food, cultures ...

— Awadhesh Kishori Amonkar is no more (1932-2017). Her demise at the age of 84 cannot be termed unexpected, after a life lived full and devoted to the practice of music. Her mother Mogubai Kurdikar had herself been a great singer, having learnt music from the founder of the Jaipur ...

Comrade Ramesh Chandra Pandey CPI (ML) senior leader Ramesh Chandra Pandey (affectionately known as Baba) passed away on 11 April 2017 at the age of 77. He was born in Lohar Farna village, Badhara block, Bhojpur district on 12 February 1940. He was a post-graduate with a keen interest in ...

(Kavita Krishnan reviews the second volume of poems by Chandramohan S, a Kerala-based Indian English Dalit poet.) Chandramohan’s poetry has the contemporary sharpness of a news bulletin, the headline of the morning’s paper. What’s different is that it shines am unsparing light on areas that are rarely the subject of ...

Last week, Comrade Santosh Roy, National Secretary of AICCTU and a long-standing leader of the DTC Workers’ Unity Centre, was traveling on the violet line of the Delhi metro. Opposite him, two young men were seated on the senior citizens’ seats. A senior citizen (who appeared to be Muslim because ...

— Mohammad Sajjad (The author is a professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University.) The centenary celebration of the Champaran Satyagrahaa coincides with half a century of the Naxalite movement. If the Champaran Satyagrahaa nationalised the peasant discontent of Bihar and integrated it with the ongoing anti-colonial struggle, it was ...

Amidst official commemorations of the centenary of the Champaran Satyagraha, it is necessary to stress the contemporary relevance of that historic peasant movement that played such a crucial part in India’s freedom struggle. The British had, through the Permanent Settlement, established the zamindari system in the villages of Bengal-Bihar-Odisha. Later, ...

A military court in Pakistan has sentenced an Indian national and former Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav to death on charges of being a RAW agent involved in “espionage and sabotage activities.” The trial, however, appears to have been a blatant travesty of justice. There is absolutely no evidence against Jadhav ...

The recently concluded by-polls in Kashmir and its aftermath underline the Modi Government’s dangerous shift in Kashmir policy. The Srinagar by-poll on April 9 recorded an abysmally low vote percentage of 7%, with eight civilian protesters being killed in firing by forces. The turnout in the April 13 repoll in ...

— Radhika Krishnan It has been a tumultuous period in several college and University campuses across the country. We were recently confronted with horrific images of students in Panjab University being brutally beaten up by the Police for protesting against a massive fee hike. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in ...

(In March-April, incidents of communal violence or attempts to foment such violence have taken place at several places – in Gujarat, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, W Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Here are brief reports on these incidents. Ed/-) Communal Violence in Vadavali, Gujarat With Assembly elections due in Gujarat, the BJP ...

— Kanika Singh One of the first steps taken by Yogi Adityanath on becoming the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh was to set up what the government called ‘anti-Romeo’ squads. These were teams of men especially deployed near colleges, their stated mandate being ‘protection’ of women from harassers. Members of ...

Just as Donald Trump’s Travel Ban is widely recognised as being a covert ‘Muslim ban,’ Yogi Adityanath’s supposed crackdown on “illegal” abattoirs in Uttar Pradesh is a thinly veiled attack on the Muslims and Dalits whose livelihood depends on the meat business. Since we live in a society of economic ...

Murderous attacks on Muslims by Hindutva mobs in the name of ‘cow protection’ – or other pretexts – have become grimly ‘normal’ in the past three years of Modi rule. A spate of statements by leaders of the BJP Government as well as a series of measures by BJP-led Governments ...

8 March – International Women’s Day – was born in the struggles that women factory workers in their thousands waged against bondage a century ago. Communists began the tradition of observing IWD in memory of those struggles. Ironically, the powers-that-be and the advertisements all across try to hide the real ...

The All India People’s Forum (AIPF) on 19 March screened Kakkoos, (Toilet) a powerful Tamil documentary film on manual scavenging in Tamil Nadu, directed by Divya. The screening took place in Chennai at the Madras Reporters Guild. Though the film was released on 26 February 2017, and immediately received much ...

In the US, the election of Trump as President has ushered in a series of hate crimes against immigrants, with attackers unleashing verbal and physical violence against persons perceived to be ‘outsiders’ or ‘Muslims’ in the US. Several South Asians and Indians also have been at the receiving end of ...

AIPWA Vidhan Sabha March in Bihar Thousands of women demonstrated under the banner of AIPWA in front of the Chief Minister on 19 March on the issues of education for women students, especially from dalit and weaker sections, increasing violence against women and attempts by the administration to shield the ...